What Is Hard
by Laryna6
Summary: Endbaby AU. So, Eidolon wanted challenge, did he? What if he'd known what he was doing when he used whatever power granted that wish? Except no. He didn't know what he was doing. He really didn't. Welcome to parahuman parenthood, where your children are tossed at eldritch abominations and punched into orbit.
1. Taking Candy From Eldritch Space Worms

_A bit of an Endbabies crackverse. Going for amusement over making the timeline match up, so yeah._

_"To become a father is not hard. To be a father is, however." Wilhelm Busch_

_Not true for mothers, of course. If only there was an equivalent 'you must be this badass or you will die making the attempt' minimum requirement for fatherhood.  
><em>

* * *

><p>"You didn't have to let him hit you," Doctor-Mother says, holding out an ice pack.<p>

"Yes, I did," Contessa replies. Not because it was part of the Path to Victory, but because there were things you really shouldn't do. Yes, human experimentation was also on the list of things you really shouldn't do, and she was party to them when it was necessary, but that didn't mean it was okay. And now that it wasn't necessary anymore, she was going to pay whatever prices were associated with it.

She'd gotten this black eye as a consequence of making other people punch out Cthulhu and save every possible Earth, after all.

Worth it.

* * *

><p>Now that Eidolon's first accidental offspring was contained, the most important question was how could it and its future siblings be used to defeat Scion?<p>

Step 1: Wait until they'd taught him how to talk.

Step 2: Get the child alone.

This itself involved a rather complicated set of steps, because Eidolon had learned his lesson about letting a kid whose tantrums could smash cities feel that his daddy had abandoned him; Legend and his husband were utterly enthralled by the new baby and discussing adopting their own despite the clear demonstration of just how much destruction small children were capable of; and the third of the Triumvirate had already declared herself Auntie Alexandria and kept tossing - later, punching - the kid into the upper atmosphere while he made happy gurgle and whee noises whenever neither of the other two could see them and freak out like they were the babies. Whenever Eidolon didn't have a super-strength power, his hugs weren't really strong enough for the kid to feel them: fortunately, personal experience and a decent thinker level by the standards of people who weren't Contessa had allowed Alexandria to figure out the physical affection requirements of a Brute of the child's level and make sure he got love tough enough to crush coal into diamonds. They had procedures for making sure he had adequate babysitting far more strict than the fledgling Master-Stranger protocols. But she was Contessa.

Step 3: Lean down to talk to him on his level, giving him an even stare when he tried to blink at her disarmingly. Oh, he wouldn't be able to function as an adult without time to learn about the world, but he had a high enough thinker level that she was not dealing with an ordinary child. He would understand that this was a serious offer.

Step 4: "I will toss you at a man. This is a bad man. I will give you candy if you scream for your daddy, auntie and uncle and say that the bad man is trying to kill you because you are a threat to him."

Step 5: Ensure that Behemoth struck Scion with sufficient force to knock it through one of Doormaker's portals into an unpopulated earth, while other portals conveyed the screams to the members of the Triumvirate.

Step 6: Profit.

* * *

><p>Alexandria put her hands on her hips and looked down disapprovingly as Legend tried to pull a still-berserk Eidolon off Contessa (but not all that hard). Alexandria wasn't helping him only half because the power set Eidolon had developed to painfully torture Scion with didn't actually have anything that would do mere physical damage. All that fear, and all it really came down to were illusion and empathic projection abilities? And enough sadism to use a thinker power to ask how to hurt Scion instead of how to kill him or how to make him fail to destroy humanity? Fate of the world aside, "The hell, kid?"<p>

"The lady said she'd give me candy." Nope, absolutely no repentance here for nearly giving his supposedly-invincible daddy a heart attack.

"What have I told you about taking candy from strange thinkers?" she demanded.

The boy frowned: Contessa wasn't a stranger... Oh! She was still strange. That must be what Auntie meant.

Alexandria approved of people who didn't ask stupid questions.

"Candy," he said simply.

She had to facepalm: her hand hit her forehead hard enough to splatter someone else's brain through the nearest wall.

Okay, so she'd need to get someone to design candy that would give him a painful stomachache without actually killing him so he'd learn to take her warnings seriously in future. There was a difference between near-invulnerable and actually invulnerable. "Well, you did something stupid and risky, so that means no candy." Before he had a chance to insult her intelligence by applying the waterworks (seriously, she wasn't David. Or Legend. Or...) she said, "You helped save the world, so you get ice cream," because positive reinforcement.

Someone was going to have to take over so she could retire to a private island in her old age without having to worry about having it blown up, she thought, picking him up with one hand and turning her phone off with the other.

Also, she'd just beat the shit out of a blubbering alien. It wasn't as though it was hard, or she had a problem with killing something that hadn't fought back when it had intended to trick humanity into exterminating itself without ever giving them any real chance at fighting back, but it had taken so damn long to get through all that mass even with Legend that she'd missed lunch. Eidolon was too busy making it suffer for touching his baby to actually do any of the heavy lifting.

When she first started bringing Behemoth to this ice cream place, the staff looked at the celebrity with stars in their eyes. After the first few visits, they had been replaced by dollar signs. "The usual?"

At Alexandria's nod, they got to work preparing three of everything. As the appetizer.

Phone off, she was blissfully unaware of all the panicked attempts to contact her as Eidolon's inability to figure out how to get the newly-arrived toddler Leviathan to stop crying flooded their HQ. Or at least that was what she claimed later.

Why, who could _possibly _have realized that since the purpose of these constructs was to keep Eidolon's life challenging, it was just about certain that one was going to show up the same day Scion died?

The leading theories were that Eidolon's subconscious chose the powers of his construct offspring based on those of powerful capes. The sources of Behemoth's powers were obvious: an 'Alexandria package' strong enough he could 'fly' through solid rock plus an even stronger form of Legend's ability to control energy: hitting people with lasers at right angles translated to lightning striking from the sky while Behemoth looked innocent. Fortunately, it wasn't very strong for months after he'd popped into existence and it mostly struck Eidolon and stupid people who didn't keep to a safe distance when a superpowered toddler was having a meltdown.

She was just glad that Legend's marriage was strong enough to weather the implications and accusations that another member of the Triumvirate shipped him with Alexandria to the point of creating a Legend/Alexandria _baby_. It had still caused an exponential increase in the number of stupid questions she got about her relations with her colleagues, and then there were the people not-joking that she should marry Eidolon now that there was a baby, as though this somehow reflected on her virtue or lack thereof even though she had nothing to do with this baby.

Well, other than being awesome enough that Eidolon used her powers, but that was a given.

Someone might have wanted to make Eidolon suffer for all this, but seeing him try to deal with Behemoth? He was already suffering enough for using an unknown power to just go and _make a wish _for something truly challenging so he'd be strong enough to beat Scion like that. And _there were more coming._ Constructs that came into existence with the sole purpose of making Eidolon's life difficult. Challenging him to something truly difficult that couldn't be solved with power alone. Something that no one, no where, had ever managed to not screw up in some way, shape or form.

Parenthood.

When the ability to handle other people was an entire category of cape power for a _reason_, and Eidolon had no social skills.

Giant monsters would have been easy by comparison. Far, far too easy to really challenge the second most powerful being on the planet – first, with Scion dead. Eidolon _wished _he'd gotten giant monsters.

Bets were already being placed on which parahumans' powers the others would have. The first had the powers of the world's two most prominent capes after Eidolon.

Alexandria was just waiting for mini-Contessa. Contessa Prime had just caused the death of her second Elder God. If humanity had _two _of them… Because they might have killed Scion and its counterpart, but there were more of those things out there. Devouring helpless worlds the way Alexandria and Behemoth were annihilating these sundaes.

Now that it was safe to tell the world about the true enemy without risking alerting Scion, they needed to start getting the world to think on not just a multiversal level but an _intergalactic _one. Take all the aggression native to a species of predators and amplified by the shards, and point it safely away from civilians.

Giving the world a target would do more to put a stop to parahuman crime than anything else until they found a parahuman with the ability to cover people in spiders. An ability like that? They'd have to pull out all the stops to keep that person from realizing their true power until they were firmly on the side of the Protectorate, no matter what it took.

If only that desperate alliance of supervillians hadn't managed to take out Hero before he finished his work on the I Win Button… Unfortunately for the forces of evil, Alexandria had her own I Win Button. It was called 'Having Contessa On Speed Dial.' And, without Scion to worry about?

"Why yes," she told Behemoth. "You _may _have some soda." It was Eidolon's own fault for revealing to the rest of them that he got stronger when truly challenged, and he had literally asked for this by volunteering as a Cauldron test subject.

* * *

><p>A child that came into existence because <em>he wasn't strong enough to fight Scion and everyone was going to die.<em>

And Scion was going to murder him. Because Eidolon wasn't powerful enough to save anyone. It didn't matter if he managed to delay a few people's deaths as long as the deaths of _everyone everywhere _were still inevitable because he had all this power and he still wasn't strong enough, wasn't good enough, and a child, _his child _was going to die because he wasn't and would never be…

No one really noticed that Eidolon had a trigger event when the Triumvirate fought Scion. His first real trigger event. No one detected it until a few years later, not in the haze of Eidolon's other shards, and then there wasn't any real rush to figure out what exactly it was.

Oh. Eidolon was now _even more broken. _Whoop-de-doo. At least the fact that it wasn't a major power meant there was _some _justice in the universe. What, like Master 2?

It would have taken a very high-level thinker to find the connection between the following events, all of which took place in the aftermath of the Zion fight.

In Boston, a young therapist watched the coverage and realized that even Eidolon wasn't so superhuman, wasn't so above it all. Even the parahumans were human enough to have trouble dealing with family, and since family relationships were so important to emotional stability and development?

Maybe she should go into parahuman child and family counseling instead of crisis intervention. Give future superheroes and potential supervillians stable foundations, nip potential threats to the world in the bud.

In Newfoundland, a tinker contemplated Eidolon's created constructs, and while he hadn't really been considering full human-level AI, maybe he should be. Before, he would have thought it would take something like an assault by multiple eldritch abominations trying to end the world to make him do something so risky, but now it turned out that there had been multiple eldritch abominations out there trying to kill everyone all along.

He should do something about that, the way Eidolon had. The hero's constructs were immortal, they'd be able to continue fighting after he was gone, and socializing them as humans, causing them to develop emotional connections to humans and become personally invested in humanity's survival: that had potential.

An AI creation that saw humanity and its future as _precious, _that crouched over the Earth protectively like a dragon guarding her horde…

In Brockton Bay, a young couple were woken up by their daughter running into the bedroom, jumping up and down from excitement. "MommydaddyI'mgonnabeasuperhero!"

Her parents rolled over and blinked blearily, trying to clear the spots from their eyes. The specks hovering in the air didn't go away.

Their daughter was _covered in bees_.

Two more trigger events took place that day.

Because the universe was just that unfair, once again Eidolon had gotten an utterly broken ability that would make everything so much easier for him.

_Create Babysitter. _

* * *

><p><em>While the Siberian won't happen here, Hero's the obvious target for someone trying to go after the fledgling Protectorate. He's <em>relatively _easy to kill compared to Alexandria and Eidolon, and also 'fucking tinkers' – taking him out is taking out their most versatile member and biggest source of nasty surprises after Eidolon._

_There was a joke floating around tumblr that if Spider Man's power was shooting actual spiders at people, _no one would commit crimes ever again. _Apparently he pretended that he had this power in some comic somewhere? _

_These are earlier versions of the characters, and they won't be exposed to as much desperation. The separation from humanity Taylor observed in Alexandria: we don't know how much of it was an act, but she still should have known better than to convince someone that Alexandria had murdered one of her friends and was going to kill the rest if Taylor didn't stop her. That speaks of years having the fact that other people don't care as much about human life as much as they really should hammered into her, which makes a sad kind of sense, given the shards. _

_Also more time in canon for Alexandria's shard to go to work on her psyche._


	2. How To Plan Parties & Manipulate People

_The game series Mega Man Zero has Siren General Leviathan, an android built to operate an environmental system that would allow her to control the world's oceans. A dragon-themed hydrokinetic (or ice user, in game mechanics, since there's a fire-ice-lighting rock-paper-scissors going on) Blood Knight with a thing for worthy opponents._

_Fandom considers her the offspring (according to WoG it's much, much worse than that) of one of the world's greatest heroes. One with the ability to copy other people's powers and over a century and a half of experience as a military commander and one man army._

_Said hero really does not approve of her life choices. Because these life choices involve supporting a government with a policy of genocide. Unfortunately, he's not in a position to stop her since he used his body as a living seal on a reality warper with global mindrape capability. Then you find out the real reason he went AWOL to do that, or not if you're playing the English version since they mistranslated a wham line._

_The level of It Got Worse in that continuity is very appropriate to Worm, so I'll be modeling endbaby!Leviathan on her once she's a little older. Blue hair and all, because you gotta have blue hair._

_Hopefully this will help me resist the desire to do an actual world fusion crossover fic. Since given certain other people's counterparts and their capabilities, there's a lot of quality nightmare fuel down that well. The last thing the Worm universe needs is for Zion to get his counterpart's ability to _not stay dead.

_'You thought I was a hero? You thought I gave a damn about human life? Wow, you could not be any more dead wrong.' Yeah. _

* * *

><p>Seriously? "No, Legend," she tried to shout over all the new arrivals, "you may not adopt all of these orphans. Other people might want to adopt some too."<p>

Her tipsy friend beamed at her. Alexandria had to squint to be sure there weren't actual lasers involved. Apparently the only part of what she'd said that he'd actually heard over all this noise was "Adopt all of the orphans!" He didn't mind if he did! What a wonderful idea! That was why Alexandria was the brains of the operation.

"I think I messed up," she heard from behind her as Legend flew away.

"What did you do this time?"

"Remember how the shards were making people evil?" David asked her slowly, grimacing.

"And you developed the power to… undo that just this morning… Meaning there's no longer anything making Legend less… Legend. Meaning he's attained some kind of critical mass of sweetness and light," Alexandria realized, wincing as she looked out over her beach, now covered in happily shrieking kids. Contessa insisting he have those beers at the working breakfast meeting wouldn't have helped, when alcohol was an emotional intensifier. So she was caught up in a Contessa plan. Joy.

The Ward beach trip had… escalated. Even with her abilities she hadn't been quite sure how it escalated quite this much, but yes, Legend being on a friendliness and goodwill high would expl- Were the people coming out of that portal the _Thanda?!_ How many people had he invited?! Yes, the world should celebrate the defeat of Zion, but most people hadn't understood the situation and it was mostly the Cauldron employees that were still going 'Woo-hoo! We're not all gonna die!' and attempting to remedy this via multi-week-long portal-assisted multi-worldwide bar crawls with their test subjects invited along. When Contessa and Number Man were planning your optimum itinerary, this was probably going to solve the problem of the people who got kidnapped and experimented on wanting revenge on their new best friends.

Alright, so as soon as Leviathan recovered, she was going to have to make the kid create her another tropical island paradise, one that wasn't infested with supervillians and easily squished normal kids.

"Don't even think about it," Eidolon warned her, and this was Eidolon, not David talking.

"Think about what?" she asked. "I'm a super-genius." She thought about a lot of things.

Still holding an icepack to his daughter's head under the beach umbrella he'd conjured earlier, the mousy little man gave her a level stare, the kind that reminded her of the fact that Mouse Protector was also a mouse. "Not until she's older and it doesn't give her headaches." Overusing her power to create new islands.

"She has to train," Alexandria pointed out.

"There are plenty of coral reefs that need repairing, eroding beaches and if she can summon fresh water in deserts that would be very helpful," Eidolon said, because training was obvious. "First Contessa," throwing Behemoth at Zion, "and now you, making a kid born yesterday make you a private tropical island." He was beyond disappointed in them and they were this close to losing honorable auntie privileges.

Leviathan whimpered and David turned back to her, Alexandria temporarily ignored but not forgotten, not when she was the reason for the whimpering. "You'll be okay, do you need Behemoth to make you some more ice?" By removing heat from the water and wrapping it in a towel.

"Hurts." She sniffled.

"I'm sorry," painkillers wouldn't work, and "I'm cycling through powers as fast as I can figure out what they do." There had to be something in there that would help with mental strain headaches. Leviathan's power must have a substantial thinker component, to handle all the factors involved in creating an island from scratch like this.

Alexandria had thought Leviathan's abilities were more than just hydrokinesis, in the same way Behemoth's casual violation of the laws of thermodynamics and power over entropy was more than just pyrokinesis (and if his power was derived from Legend's, what did that say about him, that his power opposed the inevitable heat-death of the universe?), but she honestly had just been chatting to try to get a read on the girl, not trying to get herself an island. It had taken Behemoth months to learn how to talk: were they transferring data between each other, or… Well, studying the constructs to tap their potential as weapons was less urgent now that Zion was dead.

Wait, had she really been evaluating Behemoth as a child soldier? She'd liked him well enough, she hadn't only seen him as something to use, but really?!

For heaven's sake! If removing the evil from her shard was affecting her this much, what exactly had it been doing to her? For years? If they'd had to wait for Behemoth to grow up like a normal kid before fighting Scion, or followed Cauldron's timetable, how much of her would have been left when the time came?!

Damn those things!

Eidolon's still-soaked shirt was tugged on. "Too many people splashing," she whined. With her connection to the water, could she feel all the kids Doormaker Phir Se and even Alexandria didn't even know who else were ferrying in playing and swimming around?

"I'll get you home soon," Eidolon promised her. "Alexandria, can you?" Be a voice of reason? It wasn't like Eidolon could convince people to keep a lid on things, not without putting on his costume and being threatening anyway, and he was outnumbered, supervillains would know that all they had to do to split his attention was feint for his kids and when people now knew that humanity had just killed its second god, Eidolon's power level was just a little less intimidating.

"I'll keep an eye on the Wards." Who had been conscripted as lifeguards. And then further conscripted, in some cases: after seeing him giving his little brother a piggy-back ride, Chevalier got swarmed.

* * *

><p>In the end, they didn't ask Legend what he was thinking. What he was thinking, and what a lot of other people got when they put two and two together, was that if all the parahumans had been influenced by alien mind control, then were their actions entirely their own faults?<p>

See how everyone got along so well now that the shards weren't pushing them to fight anymore? Clearly Legend was willing to let bygones be bygones, and he had the charisma to make a lot of people take his word for it. Between Legend and Contessa, the mass parties and showy use of powers made for fantastic photo ops.

Obviously saying it wasn't a supervillain's fault they became a supervillain was an insult to all the people who fought their shards to become heroes, but no one high-up really wanted to point this out, since the ability to offer amnesties for people who reformed, made some kind of proper apologies and token repayment for their crimes… Especially since Number Man had no reason to assist supervillains so they would stay alive to potentially fight Scion anymore and had put the word out that they could go straight or have their assets frozen and confiscated?

This was their opportunity to go straight or else, and since the ones who went straight wanted to establish their bona fides? And having other supervillains out there reminded people that supervillains existed and certain people used to be supervillains, so if not every parahuman was 'good' now? Sheer self-interest meant that the 'reformed' had no patience with those who weren't willing to pretend to reform potentially screwing things up for the rest of them.

While the world was distracted by parties and grandiose goodwill gestures, a lot of people made use of their powers to disintegrate or otherwise hide the bodies of the members of their organizations who might have sabotaged their ability to survive in the brave new world.

Especially when all the people who were aggressive, who would have responded with hatred and murder to personal slights even without the shards now had a _target._ And they were not going to put up with other people pulling crap while the world worked out how to let them have their murder.

* * *

><p>"I don't know if you need nutrition," Eidolon was confessing to Leviathan in the Protectorate NY cafeteria, clearly at the end of his rope, "but you have a human brain, and also a liver. These are carrots. They've got sugar in them." Emily saw the 'hallelujah!' that appeared on his face when he finally got a useful ability. "Pretend they are the bones of your enemies."<p>

Snap. Crunch. Grind.

His phone rang. "Yes?" A pause. "Yes, I'm his father." David winced as he listened. "It could have just been an electrical short… They've been… Really? Yeeessss, that does make it more likely. I'll be over there in… I have no idea how long. Let me find out," he said, looking around him and noticing that almost the entire base dining hall had gone silent. David trying to get one of his kids to eat their veggies was always quality entertainment. "Some alleged bullies just got their science fair project set on fire, and… yeah." Thank goodness he'd learned about plausible deniability and not admitting to things that could get people used in front of hundreds of witnesses. "Can someone give me a lift? I'd really rather not swap out my current power set." He'd gone months without dumping the healing ability and really couldn't afford to lose it now, when they were still having him commute over to the Mars colonists for the cosmic radiation damage they'd picked up on the way. Emily wasn't sure what his current secondary power was, but if he'd just picked up a thinker or persuasion ability, he wasn't going to drop it before heading into a parent-teacher conference.

Noticing movement in the corner, she turned to see a couple of capes doing rock-paper-scissors. The winner volunteered to give Eidolon a teleport over to Brockton Bay and hang around until it was time for him to drop Leviathan off with the researchers working on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

That would be why he was preemptively trying to get some protein and vegetables into her, so she didn't have a metabolic crash on top of the headache if she got overenthusiastic. The researchers weren't the ones pushing her: they knew that if they did, they'd lose access to her. They'd just done a little too good a job with the presentation they put together to try to convince Leviathan that this was important and she should ask her daddy to let her volunteer to help them.

Emily would be a little more grateful for being assigned duty as Eidolon's PRT liaison, meaning a front-row seat for the Protectorate and PRT's favorite sitcom, if it wasn't an open secret that the Director tended to give this duty to people who needed their attitude towards parahumans adjusted. Too much awe or fear of the top level parahumans, well tended not to survive exposure to the reality when the reality was Eidolon instead of Legend or Alexandria.

But the reason there would be notes on Emily's psych profile… assigning a survivor of the Nilbog mission to a parahuman that created extremely powerful and deadly life?

At least he was trying to keep them under control instead of just unleashing them, like Nilbog: everyone had heard about the deciding argument when he was trying to convince Behemoth to give actual school a chance. "It's important to interact with your peers to develop social skills. Do you want to end up as bad at talking to people as I am?"

* * *

><p>Alexandria looked up from her copy of the new procedures and glanced over at Legend, who (from the reflection in the window) was anniversary gift shopping. Except his husband's anniversary wasn't for… Nope, not the birthday either. <em>Legend.<em>

There was a reason she tended to think of Eidolon as David and Legend as Legend, generally with a stare or affectionate eye-roll. For all his power, David was very human, needing to be reminded by her and Legend of things like birthdays so he could scramble at the last minute and the two of them could make sure the kid in question caught a glimpse of how panicked their dad was and how important getting them something they liked was to him. The Library of Alexandria remembered because she was The Library of Alexandria: Legend remembered because Legend.

She had to wonder why? Why would Legend's shard give him a strong version of its power instead of a weak one, so he'd get killed off? When the point was to get the shards to people that would use them to fight others, to destroy humanity, why would one help someone who was genuinely such a good person it was calculated to give other people something of a complex…

Unless that was the idea. Get someone whose strength was getting along with people, getting others to get along, bogged down in fighting them instead. Since Legend was such an inspiration to so many, if other peacemakers instead modeled their behavior on his? Fought supervillains instead of reaching out to them?

Same idea as getting someone who had a plan their whole life, to work inside the system to make change, to keep society from breaking down, convinced that becoming a supervillain instead was the only option instead of calculated to weaken the system by showing others that it was possible to be one and get away with it, to control society from outside for personal benefit?

The first thing Accord noticed after Eidolon wiped the shard programming was that the OCD that made him think it was a perfectly reasonable idea to kill a teenager for barging in on a meeting was gone. The second was that he had just wasted _years_ and it should have been obvious… except his shard kept him from seeing it.

It was _not_ a coincidence that the new space war effort had just as many Thinkers as Tinkers volunteering. Now that their minds were unclouded, they could _see,_ and it was making them _furious._

Was David cooing as he brushed oil into Simurgh's fluffy down so the skin under her wings didn't get itchy? Human sweat might have started out as hair oil glands, but then it became a water-cooling system so they could run longer without overheating. The better to kill their prey with, my dear. Too much water, not enough oil for feather care. It was Alexandria that spotted that the heat of the down would be making her lose water and electrolytes without doing much to take care of those feathers. Hence the shedding and the crying from the constant discomfort and dehydration headaches as she started to scratch her wings to make the itching stop. At least David had enough sense to get an anti-itching cream and start applying that before she managed to track down a replacement feather care oil that was non-toxic and child-safe.

It made her the opposite of Leviathan: too much water was bad for Simurgh, who wasn't a duck, while Eidolon had to find an inflatable kiddy pool for Leviathan to sleep in to keep her skin from drying out overnight. At least Behemoth only set fire to the sheets when he was upset or having a nightmare.

Really? Cooing?

She could point it out, but he'd just get defensive and say that since Simurgh seemed birdlike and kept humming instead of babbling like Behemoth did before he could speak he was trying to see if that would help.

It was a good thing he'd adjusted to the idea of having Behemoth around, since it would have been disastrous if the little hellion thought he wasn't wanted and stomped off on a more permanent basis instead of just a few times, but even if they were making him tear his hair out, he seemed almost happy to have kids. Legend might not have adopted all of the orphans once he sobered up, but that was because he and his husband were concerned they wouldn't have been able to spend enough one-on-one time with them.

Were her colleagues' biological clocks ticking or something? Was this some instinctive desire to reproduce now that humanity's survival was secured and it was safe to have kids? Was she the only one who was going to escape this onslaught of domesticity?

Alexandria checked to see if she wanted kids, but no, still no. She had an entire PRT to look after, she was good on people she needed to teach to be badass, thanks.

"Did you want kids?" she asked him. "Or were you just stuck with Behemoth?"

"I thought I would never be able to have any. I had to fight, and even with Zion dead, I'm the most powerful parahuman on the planet. Ordinary children would be hostages," he told her. "But any kidnapper that tried to take Behemoth would get vaporized." Burnt to a crisp. "Any ordinary kidnapper." Contessa. Zion. "So I can't relax just yet."

Looking away from her, he confessed that, "I was a little worried that maybe I'd only wanted them so much because they were something I couldn't have." Thank goodness that wasn't true, because it was hard enough for Eidolon to figure out how to provide for Behemoth's emotional needs, especially when his ability to provide physical affection Behemoth could actually feel was dependant on what powers his shard felt like generating. If he hadn't genuinely wanted the child? Real feeling and effort counted for something, even when Eidolon had no social graces, no ability to deal with people well without using a power.

Was being around children who hadn't learned the unwritten rules about what to say and what not to say helping him? They wouldn't be able to tell that something was off about him, when they weren't human (either)?

"There we go," he said when he got to the left wingtip. "All good? Nothing's itchy?"

An answering trill.

"You don't even need to be asleep to be a little angel," he told Simurgh, smiling, and would you look at that, he was capable of being sweet. Maybe the constructs wouldn't be stuck with only a single parent for their entire lives, if he kept that up. "Maybe I'm getting the hang of-"

Pop.

Yep. Eidolon had just asked for it: incoming toddler.

Had he done that on purpose? Said that things were getting easier, just to make the fourth arrive?

Well, she supposed that answered the question of whether or not he wanted kids.

They heard the sound of displaced air again, as the toddler was replaced by an older teen. He nodded hello at them. "Yo, Dadversary. I decided to skip all the boring having to wait before I could talk and text and watch R-rated movies and jump right to rebellious teenagerdom."

* * *

><p><em>If I haven't said it before, TWT. This is an AU, so I'm specifying the right to take liberties with even non-Endbaby ages and such because I don't want to be bogged doing in doing the math.<em>

_They're showing up as toddlers instead of babies because being an actual baby sucks. Toddlers can move around and don't need to sleep like 23 hours out of the day._

_I'm going with the idea that the Endbabies got the powers of two capes that Eidolon/his shard were aware of. Then I'm looking at canon and thinking of which capes those were._

_I think Khonsu got Phir Se, definitely, but Chevalier was the other one to put up a really good showing against Behemoth. It's a thing that Endbringers hide their capabilities until you push them hard enough or they feel like screwing you._


	3. Of Course Cookies Are A Superpower

_I posted this before, but then I took it down to think about exactly what kind of AU this was going to be. Eventually I decided on a 'cleft point' (although that's not quite what's going on) that'd let me go nuts._

* * *

><p>When he finally got back to HQ, she had to ask, "Why Brockton Bay? Even in the suburbs of New York, you wouldn't need a power to commute."<p>

"Short answer: Contessa. Medium answer: I'm not made of money. I get a cut of the royalties, but most of that goes to repairing collateral damage from my fights and when I didn't get there in time. So when someone offered me a free beach house with a worrying amount of potential bedrooms in a neighborhood with good schools and I can be pretty sure it's not a bribe or a trap because she has other ways of getting what she wants, I said yes."

"Long answer?" Emily asked.

"Longer version, Cauldron built a new development in Brockton Bay as a place to settle a lot of the Case 53s as part of the out-of-court settlement for experimenting on them. I mean, they did get consent up front – I was an experimental volunteer that got lucky with one of the…" Eidolon sighed. "A lot of the Case 53s were attempts to replicate my powers. Only strong enough to fight Zion. My guess is that I would look like a Case 53 if I hadn't gotten lucky with one of my early powers. I get ones that are appropriate, but I'm not always sure what they are right away, like the one that created the kids. That was one of the reasons I couldn't have kids, my genes are…" Eidolon grimaced. "And I did try to work out at one point. It didn't work. I don't even get any improvement from doing stretches. Not that I have anything to complain about compared to most of them. Being a Cauldron Cape aside, I'm pretty well known, and Behemoth might look more human than Leviathan or Simurgh, but his eyes still glow and his body temperature isn't normal."

"Where do you hide a red fish? In a pond full of other red fish."

Eidolon nodded. "Because of that development, there were a lot of people that were obviously parahumans in Brockton Bay in addition to New Wave. The kids at his school know he's my son, but aside from that…" He brightened. "The school has a really great special needs program they're developing for parahuman children with trouble controlling their abilities: Behemoth isn't the only one there who has things happen when he gets upset. So his desks are fireproof and the teachers have extinguishers handy, and, well, it's still embarrassing for him when he loses control, but one of the kids in his class is an Alexandria package with a projective Master ability, emotion-inducing, that she has to keep clamped down. Victoria's parents are from New Wave: they had to move closer to the development because the parents at her previous school really didn't want a kid messing around with their children's brain chemistry accidentally, so they would have had to home school her."

"Is it really safe for someone to mess with the emotions of parahuman children?" who could hurt people if they lost emotional control?

"Well, it's good practice for Behemoth: I was worried that he'd start suppressing his emotions instead of learning how to feel something strongly without bursting into flames. And one of the other girls in the class has a master ability that affects insects, so that way Victoria can get immediate feedback if her control starts to slip before her aura expands to hit the rest of the classroom. It's still negatively affecting her grades because she has to split her concentration all the time, but at least it's better than thinking she's too dangerous to be allowed to play with other kids."

Even if Emily wasn't so sure. "What was this about bullying?"

"They had a lot of hard cases transfer in when they opened the special needs program. Some of them were obviously just pretending they didn't have control so they could get away with it, but some of them really were having accidents and felt terrible about what happened. Some of the first kind were extorting some of the second kind over at the high school, forcing them to do homework and get money or else they'd trigger an episode or tell the kid's friends what happened that got them sent to one of the classes for dangerous kids. Someone found out about it and since their own trigger event involved bullying, they decided to break out the big guns instead of just telling the administration."

The big guns? Tell Behemoth about the bullying and point him at that that science project. Not bad tactics. "Get your son involved, get you involved?" A member of the Trinity? That made it potential national news: good luck trying to cover-up bullying then.

A little later, Eidolon said, "I'm thinking of joining the PTA."

"Do you think you can find the time?" Was the first question, but "Is that the only reason you haven't?"

"Well, a PTA is organizing things and dealing with people. I may not look like it," he told her, "but I'm prettymuch the dumb muscle of our group." Regardless of how lanky he was, and since he'd pointed out that there was a parahuman ability involved, she realized that there was something a little off about his proportions, just how thin he was and how. That wasn't the body of a spindly but healthy adult.

Slightly emaciated? Coltish, his appearance frozen in some way before he was fully grown, or in the process of becoming inhuman? All three?

"Hero and Alexandria are geniuses," he went on, "and I can use Thinker abilities, but when we've got them, or…" Had them, now there was just Alexandria and all the Tinkers that joined the Protectorate after Hero's loss. "I can get powers no one else has, so it doesn't make sense to just have me do what other people can do, unless their ability is what's needed. And Legend hangs a little further back anyway, so it just makes sense for him to be the one to observe the battlefield and coordinate tactics. The way we used to do things when we were facing an unknown threat, Alexandria and I would charge in while Legend provided covering fire and Hero swapped out his gear as Alexandria and Legend figured out what we were dealing with. Once he was ready, he'd take my place so I could swap out my powers and help Legend with covering fire or evacuating civilians while my new powers got stronger, until we sprung the trap the other three came up with. I have to figure out what my powers are and how to use them effectively mid-battle too, so generally I have to be too focused on thinking about what I'm doing to tell other people what to do."

"So you don't have any real leadership experience."

"Well, why would I? There are a lot of people who are good at it in the Protectorate, and I'm really not."

"What if Legend and Alexandria went down, and you were the most senior person there in the field?"

"If Legend and Alexandria went down, when they're so experienced and tough? There'd be a lot of Protectorate capes that aren't as tough on the battlefield, and I'd have to keep the enemy from tearing them apart while they get Legend and Alexandria to safety," he told her, looking surprised that wasn't obvious. "If I tried to take over and split my concentration instead of focusing on protecting the others in a situation like that, I'd get people killed and I've lost enough friends."

* * *

><p>Contessa and the three-year-old with still-poofy wings stared at each other, Contessa's hand holding the box of thin mints out of reach.<p>

Steps and scenarios were rapidly generated and discarded.

Path to Victory versus Path to Cookie.

The Achilles Heel of Thinker abilities was overwhelming them: they granted perception, but generally up until some point at which information overload or something that wasn't covered by the shard kicked in and the brain made its displeasure known.

Simurgh's complete blindness to the present meant that unlike Accord and one of the girls at Behemoth's school, her opponent couldn't incapacitate her with information overload (when she knew most of it already due to her past sight) or by improvising and introducing randomness, not when most people were limited to control over their present actions. By the time their tactics became far enough in the past that the Simurgh could see them and potentially be incapacitated by them, the engagement would likely be over.

However, Contessa was not limited to rapidly making changes to what occurred in the present. She could use her power to figure out how to produce the most changes to the future of the human race.

That was much better at causing enough ripples and changes to overwhelm Simurgh now that humanity was going to survive more than ten, twenty-five years.

At first, Eidolon thought that Simurgh was, like many Thinkers, blinded by the actions of other thinkers. Contessa was the one to realize that the girl was just being lazy, not wanting to deal with the hassle of working around other Thinkers, and realize that this was a priceless opportunity to train her own power by pitting her against an opponent that was challenging without being blinding.

At thirty-eight seconds before the quarter hour, Contessa's foot lashed out to the left to hit Khonsu's solar plexus. "Ouch! Sorry sis," he said, before thinking better of it and darting into either the past or future to apologize for failing to get her the cookies when she could hear it.

* * *

><p>Heroes that were On-Call instead of working in a single city with a single time zone kept odd hours. Especially someone whose ability to swap powers meant they could solve all kinds of specialized problems provided they had enough advance notice to get ahold of the necessary ability and wait for it to get powerful enough. Managing Eidolon's schedule took more than a dozen secretaries just to field the calls and it had gotten to the point that the Protectorate didn't allow Thinkers onto the staff that actually plotted out the logistics. They burnt out valuable personnel that way. Because they could not afford to burn out Eidolon to the point the Protectorate's most versatile member and probably still the most powerful decided 'screw it, I need a vacation' when some crisis hit the parahuman's back. Eventually, it was half-outsourced to the PRT as a way for both organizations to train their dispatch officers and educate them in all the weird little transit methods and mission ability requirements they might possibly run into.<p>

Eidolon returned home around 3pm thanks to a Moonbase Tinker giving him a ride in one of the rapid suborbital shuttles and the loan of a jetpack for the landing and, upon seeing his lawn, immediately snapped several photos with his communicator and e-mailed them to a list before placing a call to Legend.

He would have stopped Leviathan if she tried to open the gate before the situation checked out, but instead she was running around the street going "Whee!" He was certain that Simurgh would love air drops, but… Once she was a little older. He didn't want to give her ideas. All Leviathan could do was take off running. If he didn't have a flight power handy, Simurgh would be much more difficult to catch if she decided she wanted to go again.

"What's up, David?" Thankfully, they had different number codes for urgent calls vs. hopefully not urgent calls vs. decidedly non-urgent calls, so people didn't have to get worried every time someone wanted to know if they were free Friday for bowling. This was in the second category.

"My front lawn is covered in adorable sleepy puppies." One of them yawned and rolled over to gnaw on a dandelion.

…Eidolon realized that he should probably do something about his lawn. Maybe burning everything off at a certain height would be good practice for Behemoth?

He heard typing as Legend checked his e-mail, then pulled up the Registry, probably checking 'dogs' and 'Brockton Bay.' "I'm guessing your son brought a friend home from school." Meaning a known new parahuman, probably not a supervillain that got past the security on Eidolon's house. "Any reason you contacted me about this?" Instead of one of the local Protectorate or PRT members? The Case 53 neighborhood had its own Neighborhood Watch, too.

"I've heard about your day." Wall-to-wall politicians, with only a short break in the UN office to check in with the Protectorate right about when Eidolon was going to get home, hint hint. "I figured I should join the people who are undoubtedly spamming your inbox with cat pictures." Since he had this priceless opportunity attempting to gnaw on his son's ankle.

He held out his communicator again to snap another photo, ending the call.

Ignoring the mock-growling dog wrecking what was left of his pant leg (the sock was already done for) Behemoth waved, grinning. "She gets to bring dogs to school!"

"Who does?" Eidolon asked, finally unlatching the gate and slipping through it carefully in case any of the dogs tried to get by him. "Leviathan," he said. He was going to remind her that she needed to stay where he could see her, but then thought better of it. "Puppies!" he called instead.

"Rachel! Dr. Yamada said so! They're assistance animals. She got to go to the pound with Dr. Yamada and get all the dogs she wanted."

Oh no. Clearly this had given his son ideas.

"And she's letting me play with them!"

"I'm letting them chew on you," Eidolon heard from behind his son. He was glad he still had that translation power, or else he wouldn't have been able to make out what she was saying through all the cookies in her mouth. "But only because you're not human." The way she was glaring at him expressed her conviction that humans sucked. No wonder she was living in a Case 53 neighborhood, then. There were all kinds of reasons a cape that triggered at her age might need emotional assistance animals, so if being around fewer people that looked like ordinary humans made her more comfortable…

Or at least he hoped she lived nearby. 'All the dogs she wanted' meant she either had parents who were willing to put up with a lot of work to make sure she recovered safely from her trigger event, meaning they wouldn't be very happy to find her missing, or she had a guardian. The guardian of a new parahuman would probably be plugged into the Protectorate, though, so as Eidolon's photos of Rachel's puppies got forwarded they'd probably figure out where she was pretty quickly, if they didn't already know.

His children had high metabolisms and sweet teeth. Some people used TVs as babysitters: Eidolon had gotten a Tinkertech oven that made different cookie recipes at set times out of Simurgh's baby shower. Toybox had decided to live up to its name. He sniffed. "Leviathan, it's snickerdoodles today!" He held the gate open for her, keeping an eye on the puppies. By now he was well aware that young animals were prone to escape attempts.

Well, less babysitter and more bait. His children were pretty durable, so mostly he had to worry about them happening to other people. Speaking of which, "Have they brought Simurgh home yet?"

Behemoth shook his head. "They're keeping her late at the baby day care again."

"Don't call it the baby day care," David said, following Leviathan into the kitchen. "You already embarrass them enough."

When the Case 53s were settled here, the PRT had expected a massive uptick in parahuman crime and built not just a larger base, but a large training facility just outside of town. The law enforcement side didn't get all that much exercise, aside from things like new cape registrations and responsible power use certificates for rogues and civilians (since it was pretty obvious that Case 53s had powers, it was handy for them to have a piece of paper they could wave around to say that they knew what they were doing and no coworkers were going to get accidentally injured), but the training facility did, since the PRT did a lot of recruitment in Brockton Bay.

The PRT had an internal day care because it would be stupid not to: keeping an eye on the members' children on a regular basis was additional insurance that they hadn't been kidnapped to force their parents to act against the organization. The baby day care, though, was the baby agent day care.

"Background checks again?" Eidolon asked. It had better be background checks. Having them roughhouse with Behemoth so they could get used to dealing with brutes and figuring out proper force application (child didn't mean harmless for a parahuman, but due to second-generation capes it did mean watch it) was one thing, and Leviathan's power set was in high demand in the summer. Unlike them, Simurgh didn't have a Brute rating. Well, Khonsu didn't either, but they'd have to be able to hit him for that to matter.

His son shrugged, neither knowing nor caring.

Simurgh was the semi-official mascot of the PRT Brockton Bay Training Academy, because she was cute, fluffy, could drop anvils on people's heads and looked pretty harmless. The way normal humans looked harmless compared to capes. He just wished they'd asked him before decking her out in bunny ears and plastic vampire fangs for the last graduation bash. She'd only just got over pretending to bite people and seeing Rachel's dogs gnaw on Behemoth wasn't going to help. Well, he should hear the PRT armored van driving up to drop Simurgh off, so if he could ask her to call off her dogs before…

"Hi," Khonsu opened his mouth. "Dadverwary," he said around the suddenly-appearing cookie.

Eidolon removed Simurgh from Khonsu's shoulder. "You've got Thin Mint all over your face," he told her before holding her towards Leviathan.

Water sprayed from the faucet. "Thank you," he said, now holding the smallest over Behemoth's head so the hot air would dry her off.

"I can't burn the dogs!"

Point. "I'll- Thank you," he said, taking the hair dryer from Khonsu.

Belatedly, he noticed Rachel creeping up behind him. "Her wings can't stay wet," he explained. "It's probably bad for them, and she still doesn't have any flight feathers." Just down.

"I like animals," Rachel said with a scowl on her face.

It took him a minute to figure that out. "Do you want to brush and dry her wings?" On the one hand, he should object to people referring to his children as animals, but after a few years learning to take advantage of anyone in the vicinity who wanted to play with a kid for a bit, not to mention Legend's plot to teach the Wards that children were a Serious Responsibility and only fun and games until someone's homework got set on fire, he knew to take the help he could get.

Rachel nodded and held out her arms.

It took a few months for Eidolon to notice that Rachel was neither visiting every day after school nor even camping out, but had in fact moved in, occupying one of the worrying number of bedrooms far enough away from his own that he attributed any barking to one of the neighbor's dogs.

Once he contacted the Protectorate's social services division and found out that this was one of those things that everyone had known about but him, he didn't really mind: it was nice to have someone around with even worse social skills than his, and having her and her dogs around made it much less likely that Behemoth would decide to burn the house down the next time Eidolon failed at parenting. It was one thing to hit Dad with lightning, but he wasn't going to hurt the dogs! The very idea made him all huffy and then he started stamping around. Of course, calling an angry Behemoth adorable was probably one of those parenting fails that would end in arson.


	4. Plucky Kids Should Not Be A Thing

"Don't worry, 'Melia!" Victoria said, clapping the younger girl on the back. Her hair shone in the sunlight and she looked every bit the victorious hero. "Whenever bad guys come to kidnap you, I'll stop them!"

She was so brave… Would Amelia be like this, if her father was a hero instead of a Legitimate Businessman? "But it must be so much trouble for you, and our parents are enemies…" she said, looking slyly down at her hands before glancing up at Vicky. She hoped that Victoria only thought her cheeks were red because Behemoth had helped take down the kidnappers too.

"I don't care about that!" Vicky insisted. "I'll always save you!"

"Because…" Amelia wondered shyly.

"Because I get to punch people!"

Behind them, the paramedics loaded the broken and burned (but still twitching) bodies of the people who had attempted to kidnap the young healer into the secure ambulances as Marquis and Brandish stared at their offspring.

"I don't know whether to thank her for saving my daughter or stab her for breaking her heart," Marquis said finally.

"It's your fault for giving her that 'I'm really easy to get along with as soon as you people learn to worship me' t-shirt."

"I did no such thing. Although perhaps making your daughter's ego more apparent will help my Amelia get over this crush. I gave her a gift certificate." He had nothing to do with what Brandish's daughter chose to spend it on.

A bolt from the heavens: Eidolon, landing on his knees and a single hand. Not getting the same powers twice meant he had to get creative about rapid transit when he didn't have time to switch out powers and hope for something better. He staggered to his feet, wincing when he saw that he'd cracked the pavement.

Victoria's mouth hung open. That was so cool. Not when he got back up, because Behemoth's dad was a dork, but that casual demonstration of sheer power… She wondered how long it would take her to figure out how to hit with exactly the right amount of force? Just spiderweb cracks, otherwise she'd get in trouble when her parents got billed, but if it was just going to be resurfaced anyway… Ignoring the others, she walked over to peer down at the asphalt.

"Aren't you going to thank Taylor?" Sveta asked, still wrapped around Behemoth. What she was really saying was 'why aren't you thanking Behemoth?' "It was her bugs that tracked the van so Behemoth and Vicky could catch up."

Amelia wanted to thank Taylor, but she'd seen the flyers chasing her. Behemoth and Vicky could fly, but since Sveta was riding on Behemoth, that meant Taylor got to be carried by Vicky.

Taylor shrugged. "It was Lisa that told me that you didn't think it was a good idea to go but were going to go anyway. We just thought we'd be yelling at people for being mean to you and making you do things. We didn't think we'd get to foil a kidnapping!" But she wasn't complaining! The exact opposite of complaining.

"Not sitting in a tree 'cause Vicky's stupid," was Behemoth's judgment.

"Hey!" Of course Victoria would hear that part. "I'm not stupid!"

Taylor gave her a look, folding her arms over her The Beetles t-shirt, the famous Abbey Road image replaced with colorful bugs.

"I'll punch you!" Vicky threatened.

"Here," Behemoth said, handing Sveta's head and bundle of tentacles to Taylor.

"Be careful!" Eidolon called as Behemoth and Vicky took off. "Don't knock her into buildings, I'm already going to have to repair this street!"

"You don't mind that he…" Marquis asked, raising an eyebrow.

"He'll be fine, as long as her mother doesn't mind," he said, nodding to Brandish as well. "As long as he's careful not to hurt a friend, it's a good thing that he gets practice in. I used to worry about it more, but Alexandria always said it was okay and after that time I had to go pick him up from the moon?" Eidolon shrugged: the self-styled Glorious Empress' threats against his son's limbs weren't all that worrying compared to escape velocity plus possible asphyxiation. He thought Alexandria might be a little jealous that Behemoth could breathe in space. "After her healing powers?" he asked Marquis.

The 'leading citizen' of Brockton Bay sighed and nodded. "She was sneaking off to the hospital to heal people again."

"She has to sneak off to heal people?" Brandish demanded. "I swear, if I find out that you had our children switched at birth…"

Marquis drew himself up, and if these were the old days, Eidolon reflected, watching bugs position themselves behind the former supervillian, he would be getting stabby right about now. The head of the Brockton Bay wards program already had her eye on Taylor: the girl had good instincts. "As if I would give up Amelia Claire to someone who…"

Eidolon tapped his foot, backing it up with the same power he'd used to get here. The crack echoed slightly off the nearby buildings, and he hid the wince at wrecking more of the pavement, but he did not want a truce breach in this particular community, not when they'd drag the rest of the PTA into it. "Healing powers, especially healing powers that need a thinker component in order to figure out what exactly to do," he told them, "are mentally and physically exhausting. I've had healing powers off and on several times, and even if I use another slot on something that helps me reduce the strain, there are reasons that the Protectorate strictly regulates our members with healing abilities. The fact that revealing their true abilities leaves them open to kidnapping attempts isn't even in the top three reasons. There are billions of people on the planet, and almost all of them are getting older. Amelia isn't capable of being in enough places at once to heal everyone who wants her to heal them, and she needs to internalize that because they are going to try to guilt-trip her."

Marquis nodded, glowering.

"Healing powers might be more common now that the shards aren't actively malicious in what powers they give us," Eidolon continued, "but that just means that Amelia is setting precedents that will get applied to other people's kids. If she gives in to demands, then the people who want miracles can point to her and demand the same unhealthy sacrifices from kids like…" he cut himself off before admitting that the Protectorate had found an even younger girl with healing and body modification capability almost on Amelia's level. "Let me know if you need Alexandria and Legend to sit down with her," he told Marquis. "The Protectorate needs to take a public stand on this anyway, and they wouldn't mind being the bad guys here." So Amelia didn't get too angry with her father.

* * *

><p>"How. The fuck. Did this happen." A photocopy of the headline was at all of their seats. "A bunch of plucky kids foil a kidnapping. They're cute and two of them are Cape royalty, one of them's a Case 53, and the heir of New Wave saving Marquis' little princess. Since at least one of them is earmarked for the Protectorate, if this happened in any other city this would be great, but this is not just any city, now is it?" A death glare met each of their eyes. "Is it?"<p>

"No," said one of the capes, for the sake of moving things along.

"This is our showpiece. One of the largest concentrations of capes per capita in the First World. One of the lowest crime rates in the country, and even if that's because criminals are cowards," and no one was going to mug a figure on a dark night that might be able to phase the criminal's head into a wall, "In theory it's because no one would dare make trouble in a city this close to the PRT's largest training camp. Filled with members of our support staff, our off-duty forces, as well as the Protectorate presence. And Marquis' daughter was kidnapped in broad daylight and had to be rescued by _plucky kids_."

* * *

><p>"You stopped, and I don't have a headache," Simurgh realized, blinking. "If I don't have a headache, do you have a headache?" she wondered, but kept talking without waiting for a response because it was awhile before Contessa's response would become part of the past so she could hear it anyway. "I don't have a headache! I won, I won… Ohno." The victory dance stopped cold.<p>

Because Simurgh could see the future, even if she wouldn't be able to feel that Contessa had put the box of cookies on top of the girl-shaped construct's head before wandering off on the path to the nearest ice pack for another hour. Could see it full of many, many headaches now that she was actually good enough to give Contessa a real workout, one that let her feel the burn. "Ohno. I messed up…"

This was even worse than when Khonsu warped in, picked her up and put her back down again six feet to the left of where she thought she was. Dad had to keep picking her up so she didn't keep walking into walls. Once all of that became part of the past it was very embarrassing to see everyone talking about her while she was having conversations with people who weren't there.

And that was how Contessa found out how her powers worked, although the reason Simurgh hadn't known that something was wrong right away when Khonsu did that by the fact people figured out she was blind in the present was that Contessa was already starting to guess. Contessa had carried on conversations through precognition telling her what sounds to say when before too, so she had a hint of it when she saw it. So Khonsu making them figure it out a little earlier hadn't created enough of a ripple to be immediately apparent.

It was great, though: she could taste cookies all the time except when she was actually eating them! Of course, she had to eat them and not be able to taste them temporarily or else she'd never be able to taste them at all.

* * *

><p><em>Teeny 'pow, to the moon' and 'hold my flower' references because I fail to let old jokes die.<em>

_Humans have a huge blind spot right in front of us: we literally can't see what we're looking directly at. We don't notice this because we have our eyes dart around so we get video data from looking at things sideways and our brains extrapolate the paths of moving objects. It's really hard to show someone this blind spot since we're so good at automatically compensating for it._

_Realizing that the recruiting Simurgh conversation is not really taking place in real time makes it interesting to go back and re-read the chapter._

_I think the Simurgh's abilities are rather like that: she compensates for her present-blindness automatically, so it's not something she's constantly aware of. If someone got in that blindspot they could fly up to the Simurgh there in outer space and take a permanent marker to her wings before killing her, and she'd have no clue they were there._

_Apparently it's proven that in order to take in data for analysis at all, any intelligence has to have a blind spot. Humanity's blind spot is there because it's where the optic nerve hooks in, which brings data from the eye to the brain. The present and the time around the present is when the Simurgh is observing and analyzing all that data from the past and future: that's a heck of a lot of data, which is why I don't think her blindspot is a handful of minutes – think bandwidth. _

_Hopefully at this rate Amy'll be over her precocious crush on Glory Girl before they hit their teens._


End file.
